This is a scary election season, with so much racism and misogyny coming out of the woodwork and being normalized by the Trump campaign and the GOP. In this context, Clinton was of course correct that a core of support for Trump's campaign is driven by racial and gender anxieties and even hatred. And the people who espouse, enable, or normalize those views should be confronted and held accountable.

But in a world of rapid-fire social media, where we are connected to each other in a one-dimensional way, it is easy to forget that people are complex and that even hateful comments and attitudes needn't be expressions of an essential and unchanging character. Such comments and attitudes are likely to be instead the product of ignorance, fear, and peer or family influences. Martin Luther King presupposes this to be the case when he said that the aim of nonviolent direct action is to "create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood."

It's hard to say what kind of treatment the "deplorables" deserve. It certainly doesn't seem that they have earned any respect. But I'm struck by a couple of recent articles about hate-merchants who have abandoned their hateful views precisely because others have had the grace to treat them with this undeserved respect.

The first is about Derek Black, son of Stormfront founder Don Black and former heir apparent to white nationalism. As reported here, Derek renounced his views in 2013 in a letter to the Southern Poverty Law Center. More recent reporting has shown that the evolution in his thinking was enabled by the willingness of some of his college classmates to treat him as a normal person, even knowing about his noxious views and associations.

In an amazing gesture, a Jewish classmate invited him to Friday night Shabbat dinners, even while Black continued to defend views about "racial realism" and "white genocide." What seemed pivotal to Black's transformation were the personal relationships that allowed him to consider arguments against his views to be something more than enemy propaganda.

The second article is about how the granddaughter of the founder of the Westboro church gradually abandoned her hateful views. As with Black, she was persuaded by arguments--but only when those arguments came from people who, even though sometimes mercilessly mocking her views and church, managed also to treat her with a respect that she hardly earned through protesting that "God hates fags."

So here's to hoping that as we mock the deplorables for their hatefulness and idiotic conspiracy theories, we might also find some opportunities that allow them to see us as fellow human beings.

Some think of Trump as a straight-talker who tells it like it is. Sure he doesn't have any policy ideas to speak of, but he is going to have "the best" policies and plans after the election. And of course he has a secret plan to defeat ISIS.

In an interview with CNBC from 2012 he explains why: if you reveal specifics, then you won't be elected. If you don't reveal a plan, then no one can criticize you for it. So you should hide your "plans and motives." Not from ISIS, but from the American people.

This is about the son of the GOP candidate in the race that will probably decide who controls the Senate next year:

Using the username Joeyj424, Joey Heck posted inflammatory and misogynistic comments on Reddit during the past year.

Heck’s son also upvoted, or endorsed, a number of racist and anti-Semitic pictures and memes. ... One image he upvoted was a racist depiction of a group of black children with the caption, “God made the little n-----s, He made them in the night, He made them in a hurry, and forgot to make them white!”

He also upvoted a meme of a white person with a disability in a wheelchair, which read, “Just another retard who thinks hes a n----- I hate when white kids throw up gang signs”. In another picture he upvoted, a penguin is shown in front of an oven expressing happiness that “my jews are almost done!”

Mea culpae ensued, and the family is now saying that the son is seeking "counseling" (of course). Now I guess we shouldn't blame the father for the sins of the son. But can you imagine this happening to the son of a candidate who did NOT endorse Trump?

Google is ground zero for a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior. This is a new surveillance capitalism that is unimaginable outside the inscrutable high velocity circuits of Google’s digital universe, whose signature feature is the Internet and its successors. While the world is riveted by the showdown between Apple and the FBI, the real truth is that the surveillance capabilities being developed by surveillance capitalists are the envy of every state security agency.

Federal officials charged a University of Illinois at Chicago engineering student with making the threat that shut down the University of Chicago on Monday, saying his online post threatening to kill U. of C. students and staff was in retaliation for the shooting of Laquan McDonald.

Apparently the threat was posted in the comments section of a video and then quickly deleted. The threat is still reprehensible and will surely fuel further hatred and reinforce the racism of the Know Nothings constituting the GOP base and now their leadership.

Article from the Trib via https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjqgqWjkLnJAhVIo4gKHVZ7DbsQqQIIHjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chicagotribune.com%2Fnews%2Fct-university-of-chicago-gun-threat-met-20151130-story.html&usg=AFQjCNFsjO9rR_G___ZFQYHDZCZttI7S8Q&sig2=XcK6v9SXRGnj3yIG51GMqw

The WHO notes that eating 50 grams, or 1.75 ounces, of processed meat a day "increases the risk of colorectal cancer by about 18%." For comparison, smoking a pack of cigarettes each day increases a person's risk of developing lung cancer by about 2400%, according to a 2005 study in the British Journal of Cancer.

"The effect of red meat is surprisingly weak, far weaker than the effects of tobacco," Johnson said.

In the UK, people have a 5% risk of being diagnosed with colon or bowel cancer during their lifetimes. Assuming they ate 50 grams of bacon each and every day of their lives, a back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that their lifetime risk of these cancers would rise to 6%.

Mike Huckabee wants to give us an important lesson about sinfulness and forgiveness. (I've added some missing adjectives for clarification.)

Good [i.e., white Christian heterosexual] people do regrettable and even disgusting things. ... The reason that the law protects disclosure of many actions on the part of a [white Christian heterosexual] minor is that the society has traditionally understood something that today's blood-thirsty media does not understand--that being a [white Christian heterosexual] minor means that one's judgement is not mature. ... They are no more perfect a family than any family, but their Christian witness is not marred in our eyes because following Christ is not a declaration of our perfection, but of HIS perfection.

Huckabee ... slammed President Barack Obama for inviting "some of these thugs and rioters and mob members ... to sit down and have a conversation" at the White House, a reference to meetings the President held with young activists and community leaders, among others, this week.

"When people are breaking the law, they don't get an invitation to the White House. They ought to be getting an invitation to the big house," he said.

The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.

From the 1937 FBI memorandum on "Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry":

"With regard to the picture 'It's A Wonderful Life', [REDACTED] stated in substance that the film represented a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a 'scrooge-type' so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists.

In addition, [REDACTED] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.

The irony here is that a real Communist would never say that the problem is with the bad behavior of some bankers, as if the problem could be fixed with more regulation or better business ethics. To blame the individual bad actor is part of the capitalist ideology.

To his supporters, Snowden is a heroic whistleblower. To his critics, he is a "grandiose narcissist," "a paranoid libertarian," or perhaps Putin's useful idiot. Despite Poitras' best efforts, the movie confirms the views of his critics.

Transparency and the need for public debate are his battle-cry. But early in the film, he explains that his decision to begin leaking was motivated by his opposition to drone strikes. ... [C]iting his opposition to a widely debated policy as his motivation for increasing transparency is, well, odd. But it's also illustrative. Snowden's leaks aren't primarily aimed at returning transparency or triggering a public debate; they are about creating his preferred policy outcomes, outcomes that usually involve a weaker state.

I believe the general point applies to "journalist" Greenwald as well.

She is a transgender, renewable energy consultant running for Assembly District 30 in Washoe County, Nevada.

Her day job, sexual expression and the fact that she once worked on John Kerry's presidential campaign don't fit the traditional mold of the Republican orthodoxy. But that didn't stop Gov. Brian Sandoval from endorsing her.

If Scott, 50, wins the general election against incumbent Democrat Michael Sprinkle, she will be the first openly transgender politician to hold office in the Legislature

While describing her struggles as a working mother, the usually politically correct first lady used the racial slur, gypped. Defenders of Romani point out that the abbreviation, "gyp," is nothing more than a callous slur used by the culturally insensitive. Similar slurs to "gypped" include "Jewed down" or calling someone an "Indian giver."

But it's not entirely Michelle's fault. It seems as though she borrowed the offensive colloquialism from her husband, President Barack Obama. In 2009, at a town hall meeting in Allentown, Penn., Obama said that he was seeking to regulate health insurance companies to make sure that people don't get "gypped."

We should, in fact, stop saying 'gypped.' But the outrage is obviously disingenuous. Most people don't associate the word with Gypsies/Roma/Sinti. That is why the Daily Caller was happy to use the "offensive colloquialism" in their own articles in the past. I guess basic honesty is too much to expect from the right-wing outrage machine.

Check out these very special Father's Day traditions from around the world:

Canada

Our neighbors to the north celebrate Father's Day every year by gathering at their nearest cemetery to reenact the traditional Father's Day Tale, with the mayor traditionally playing the role of the Father's Day Skeleton and children playing his helpless victims.

The tragic shooting death in Seattle never became a mass shooting since the bad guy with a gun was stopped by a good guy with . . . pepper spray.

A lone gunman armed with a shotgun opened fire Thursday in a building at a small Seattle university, fatally wounding one person and injuring three others before a student subdued him with pepper spray as he tried to reload, Seattle police said.